Colbert surely twisted the shiv in Cook’s gut with that one. “I Only See My Wrist.” That was the money quote that day. Classic Colbert.

Yes, yes: Everyone’s waiting and anticipating the Apple Watch. Except, maybe, me. I do so enjoy being the odd one in the bunch.

I’ve played the latest Apple keynote through three times + the iPad Air 2 intro video this morning. I’m still perplexed at how the Watch fits in.

If THIS is Apple’s answer for the TV remote I’m not sold. Yet. I reserve the right to be sold later. But, just now, I’m not buying.

The Apple TV IS the undisputed battleground of tomorrow and Google, Microsoft, Amazon, everybody is going to be vying for the choice spot at the digital nucleus of the family. It simply makes a ton of sense.

In my house, Apple’s already won that battle. They don’t need to fight for the right to be my remote (I keep finding the damn things in my couch!). How many of those have I purchased as a replacement only to find it later? I AM looking forward to the day Apple gets it’s head out of the clouds and unveils the potential of the Apple TV: home security, home automation, home communication, home entertainment… Hell, Apple HOME right?

So, while Apple TV is coined a “fascination” of Cooks and technically a “hobby” of Apple’s… Why is Apple Watch being billed as something entirely Full Born? Shouldn’t Apple Watch be at the Hobby 1.0 stage? No? Hmmm. So, I’m left scratching my noggin wondering if Apple TV is going to be rechristened as something entirely different at some point. And billing it as something less than what it is to become is distasteful to Tim Cook. Possibly. I wonder if Apple TV will simply be discontinued. We consume so stinking much content on our iPads these days don’t we? It’s intimate. It’s personal. It’s a private window into whatever is going on. Five people can be watching five different things. AirPlay bridges the sharing gap nicely (Kudos Apple! Nailed that one). So, Apple TV doesn’t need Watch to make it a complete product. Apple TV needs a better interface and a better solution for content access. And, perhaps THAT is the rub. Apple TV is a “hobby” until Apple can perfect the user experience. Maybe they feel they have the Watch 1.0 experience pretty nicely tailored. At least well enough to warrant “non-hobby” status. I could hop on board if that’s the rationale.

Apple TV could be so much better. So much nicer. If Apple IS about a delightful experience, Apple TV falls short of their expectations and deserves the arm’s length relationship it has with mothership Apple.

I didn’t think I would like the non-skeumorphic icons. I’m not crazy about them on iOS. Yosemite will probably carry me over that hump.

Right off the bat I was concerned about app compatibility. We’ve all been stung by that with these updates. Yet, here it is 30 minutes in. I’ve launched all my go-to apps and I only have 8 requiring update via Software Update. Yet, they launch fine, docs open, save, reopen. Try THAT Windows!

I’ll run Yosemite for a while on this production machine before I take anything else past Maverick. But, there’s plenty of reason to appreciate the polish Apple has applied to this latest version of OS X.

First impression of the UI is the login screen after installation. That’s a really nice “Hello”. Very subtle. Very beautiful. Very elegant. Very… Jonny Ive (honestly).

Next, and particularly impressive, is Safari. I’ve nearly exclusively moved over to Chrome (and Firefox for one very specific site cpanel). Safari hasn’t factored for a long time in my daily use except on iOS. Th new OS X Safari *may* lure me back across the aisle. Realistically, I doubt that… I have too much configuration invested in Chrome at this point to really seriously a permanent move. Kudos to Apple for getting their browser tight and right though. (fwiw, I still miss RSS)

There are so many fresh new nooks and crannies to explore. I’m genuinely looking forward to this one. Those who know me well, know I just plunge into these updates with a reckless pursuit to see what’s waiting on the other side and know the price for that will (usually) be picking up the broken pieces of busted apps and such. And, usually, that’s apparent within the first thirty minutes. Judging by the stability, ease of migration and lack of core apps misbehaving I have to say right now, barely 10 minutes in this is going to be one of the easiest updates I’ve been through of all the OS X releases. It does make me wonder what Yosemite Server must be like. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Which also makes me wonder about ZFS implementation (or lack of) in Yosemite. More on that later if there’s anything to pass along. A boy can hope 🙂

A restart was of no help at all. The Apple Store app says I have no updates in progress and nothing needs updating. So…?

UPDATE: So, my fine netizen friends, the very simple solution was to isolate my computer from the internet. In my case, that meant turning off wi-fi. Restart (yet again) and relaunch Pages. This time Pages launched beautifully, without complaint and as expected even after I reconnected to network services. FYI, I’m running the latest version of Maverick and all the Apple productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages) as of Friday, October 3, 2014.

A very simple solution that seems to not be documented anywhere (useful). Yet again, I’m here to help. I’m a giver :*

My four kids are still young. They will be for a while longer. Their little ears don’t need to hear all the <bleeping> words some of these otherwise acceptable programs have.

AppleTV has replaced Cox Cable programming in our household. If it’s not on the AppleTV we don’t see it or even know it exists. I want the ability to CENSOR (gasp! I know) the audio content that comes through.

My iTunes Radio channels are censored at my request. But, what I’d really prefer is a simple audio cut-out at the moment so and so fires off a GD or an somesuch. Surely there’s a crowdsourced database out there that pegs the bad word at 1:10:05 and can be scrubbed out.

The craze among kids these days is Airsoft. Once the kids start blogging about Airsoft… it’s either on the rise or it’s jumped the shark. (Hint: it’s too early to have jumped the shark).

So, I’m trying to mashup my love for the Mac platform, my love for tinkering and coding and mash all that up with FPS and MMO gaming. I’ve found an FPS platform I think may be able to accommodate all of the above…

It’s been a long time since I “wrote” a game from the ground up. Think it was a move-based-game back in 1985’ish with my friends Russell and Erik. We banged it out over a weekend on a TRS-80 and wrote it in BASIC. Forget how many lines of code we laid out, it was a lot more than anything else we’d taken on before. It wasn’t what I’d call a shippable product. But, it was a more-than-solid beta with pixel collision detection (easy), variables for terrain “encumberances” – which simply meant groups moved slower across bogs and mountains than in flat terrain or ships on water. We even took a crack at group vs. group combat rules as I recall. It was an algorithmic attempt at allowing for large scale combative encounters.

The whole thing was somewhere between a digital Penté and World of Greyhawk. And now I’m about to be up to something equally entertaining.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for the past several years and have a primary level 90 raiding toon (iLvl 558 Ret Paladin) and a secondary “alt” that I use for gathering herbs and ores (up to level 70 zones). My guilds full of people my age and in some cases older (which = more mature behavior more often).

Warcraft on Mac is significantly similar to the PC version (which I’ve downloaded in the past). The thing I like most about the Mac version… FAR less malware exploits.

I discovered something nice about the Mac version though for multi boxing purposes… I can completely duplicate the World of Warcraft directory in the Applications folder (rename it to Read the rest of this post »

Is it too much to ask for a simple, unified search across all the discombobulated silos that make up AppleTV content?

I’ve worked with Lucene and I’ve worked with Nutch and Acrobat Indexes. This isn’t hard to do. Heck, hire me for a couple months. We’ll get this done PDQ.

It could go a long way to helping your CONTENT PARTNERS… It would go a helluva long way to making the user experience immensely better. Isn’t that what you claim to be all about? Or is your “hobby” exempt from your best efforts? Hullo!!

I wanted to watch something, anything… with Stephen Hawking. I didn’t care if it was iTunes content, or Netflix content, or Hulu content, or Smithsonian content, or PBS content. But, why in hell do I have to search 19 times?

Update your more-than-capable OS just this wee little bit, please? Or let us write and distribute the app necessary to get the job done. This is getting ridiculous.